Mental representations aren’t just for chess masters; we all use them constantly. A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds; that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa. Some people’s representations are more detailed and accurate than others, and they can report, for example, details
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